Born 1798,
New York, New York
Died 1877,
Washington, D.C.
Charles Wilkes was born in New York City, the son of a prosperous businessman. After being educated by his father in mathematics and navigation, he joined the merchant marine in 1815; he was appointed a midshipman in 1818. Wilkes continued his studies of navigation and astronomy and in 1833 was appointed head of the Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, which later became the Naval Observatory and the Hydrographic Office.
For many years the U.S. government had discussed the idea of sending an exploring expedition to make a scientific study of the world’s oceans. On May 14, 1836, President Andrew Jackson signed a bill that created the U.S. South Seas Surveying and Exploring Expedition. In 1838, after many false starts, Wilkes was appointed to head the expedition although he was only a lieutenant.
Wilkes departed from Norfolk, Virginia, in August 1838 in the flagship Vincennes, which was accompanied by five other aged and not very seaworthy ships. The expedition included naval officers charged with studying the oceans and several civilian scientists who were to study the natural history of the lands they visited. Since the exploring party spent most of the first year at sea, the scientists had little opportunity to carry out their work.
In January 1839 Wilkes’s squadron sailed around Cape Horn at the tip of South America and entered the oceans near Antarctica for the first time. Sailing among the Pacific islands, they surveyed a total of 280 islands until they reached Sydney, Australia, in November 1839. Leaving the natural scientists in Sydney, Wilkes went south to visit Antarctica in December.
On January 16, 1840, Wilkes was able to navigate through the ice that surrounded the continent of Antarctica. At a distance he saw an island lying off the mainland; three days later he sailed into a deep bay and definitely sighted land. Coincidentally, this was the same day the French explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont D’Urville also saw the mainland of Antarctica for the first time. These were the first two confirmed sightings of the mainland of Antarctica. Unconfirmed sightings had previously been made by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (see separate entries) in 1820 and by American and British whaling captains in 1829; the English sealing captain John Biscoe had landed on and named Adelaide Island off the Antarctic Peninsula in 1832.
Two weeks later Wilkes was able to sail the Vincennes through a maze of icebergs into a bay along the mainland and approach within a half-mile of the coast. He named the place Piner’s Bay after a member of his crew; this portion of the Antarctic coast is known as Wilkes Land. Although his crew was by now near mutiny and wanted to turn back to Sydney, Wilkes pressed on as far as 100° E and discovered the area that is known as the Knox Coast. In February, when the ship was stopped by a large ice barrier that was later named the Shackleton Ice Shelf, Wilkes sailed north toward the Pacific Islands and Hawaii.
Along the way Wilkes explored Fiji Island and then led the expedition to the Hawaiian islands; while they were in Hawaii one of the scientists set up an observatory on the volcanic peak of Mauna Loa. In May 1841 the party entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the Pacific coast of the United States, then explored the Pacific Northwest; altogether they charted 800 miles of streams and coasts. They returned to Hampton Roads, Virginia, in July 1842, having sailed more than 80,000 miles (completely around the world) and collecting materials for a number of scientific fields, including zoology, botany, anthropology, geology, meteorology, and hydrography.
Soon after his return Wilkes was court-martialed for mistreating his crew, but he was eventually cleared of most of the charges. He was promoted to the rank of commander in 1843. During the years between 1844 and 1874 Wilkes worked on the reports of the expedition: his five-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition was published in 1844, and he edited the 20 scientific reports, writing two of them himself. Congress authorized the publication of these works, but budgeted only enough money to print 100 copies.
During the U.S. Civil War Wilkes had a checkered career. When the war broke out he was commander of the San Jacinto, a ship designed to keep Confederate traders from reaching port. On November 8, 1861, he stopped the British mail ship the Trent and removed two Confederate representatives, James Mason and John Slidell, who were on their way to Europe. Although this action, which is known as the Trent Affair, made Wilkes a hero in the United States, it caused an international incident. The two men were released and President Abraham Lincoln condemned Wilkes’s behavior in order to avoid a war with Britain.
In September 1862 Wilkes was commissioned as a commodore and put in charge of U.S. operations in the Caribbean. Although he failed to capture any Confederate ships he offended several foreign governments, which complained of neutrality violations. Wilkes was recalled and demoted; in 1864 he was court-martialed for insubordination and suspended from duty. Later commissioned as a rear admiral, he retired in 1866; he lived in Washington until his death in 1877.
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